The principal goal of the brain-computer interface is to translate brain signals into meaningful commands to control external devices or neuroprostheses to restore lost functions of patients with severe motor disabilities. The invasive recording of brain signals involves numerous health issues. Therefore, BCIs based on non-invasive recording modalities such as electroencephalography are safer and more comfortable for the patients. The BCI requires reconstructing continuous movement parameters such as position or velocity for practical application of neuroprostheses. The BCI studies in continuous (...) decoding have extensively relied on extracting features from the amplitude of brain signals, whereas the brain connectivity features have rarely been explored. This study aims to investigate the feasibility of using phase-based connectivity features in decoding continuous hand movements from EEG signals. To this end, the EEG data were collected from seven healthy subjects performing a 2D center-out hand movement task in four orthogonal directions. The phase-locking value and magnitude-squared coherence are exploited as connectivity features along with multiple linear regression for decoding hand positions. A brute-force search approach is employed to find the best channel pairs for extracting features related to hand movements. The results reveal that the regression models based on PLV and MSC features achieve the average Pearson correlations of 0.43 ± 0.03 and 0.42 ± 0.06, respectively, between predicted and actual trajectories over all subjects. The delta and alpha band features have the most contribution in regression analysis. The results also demonstrate that both PLV and MSC decoding models lead to superior results on our data compared to two recently proposed feature extraction methods solely based on the amplitude or phase of recording signals. This study verifies the ability of PLV and MSC features in the continuous decoding of hand movements with linear regression. Thus, our findings suggest that extracting features based on brain connectivity can improve the accuracy of trajectory decoder BCIs. (shrink)

The demonstration of the absolute simplicity and real oneness of the Necessary Being, on the one hand, and the presentation of an explanation for the possible beings that are consistent with this oneness are among the most important challenges that Islamic philosophy has to deal with. By restricting the reality of being to the Essence of the Necessary, gnostics have solved this problem successfully; however, philosophers' confirmations of an independent and original existence for possible beings based on the principles of (...) causality is inconsistent with the absolute simplicity of the Necessary. All the efforts of Muslim philosophers for solving this problem were unsuccessful until Mulla Sadra's time. By posing the philosophical principle of 'the Truth in its simplicity contains all things', he solved this riddle and demonstrated the individual oneness of being in the light of a new explanation of the principle of causality. In this way, he paved the way for philosophy to have access to the individual oneness of being. This paper aims to explain Mulla Sadra's significant efforts in this regard. (shrink)

The relationship between morality and law is one of the issues that has provoked considerable controversies. Among others, an important discussion is whether obeying “conventional morality” in public and/or private spheres should be legally enforced by legislators. In this paper, we will look at the controversies over the issue of the “legal enforcement of morality” in the well-known debate between Herbert Hart and Patrick Devlin. In light of Richard Hare's moral philosophy, we will begin by distinguishing three realms of morality. (...) We will then clarify Deviln's view on “conventional morality”, employing the terminology derived from Hare's moral philosophy. After elaborating the implications, consequences, and roots of “conventional morality” in Devlin's view, we will turn to the relation between law and “conventional morality”. Finally, we will criticize Devlin's approach and highlight our objections to his account. By showing the flaws of Devlin's conception of “conventional morality,” we will challenge her legal view of morals. (shrink)